How Emails Can Reveal Whether Someone Is Keeping A Secret

Why Is This Important?

Because it's hard to keep a secret secret.

Long Story Short

Researchers have discovered that when people keep big secrets, they have a tendency to write their emails in a certain way. People actually tend to increase communication with the people they're trying to keep a secret from.

Long Story

To conduct the study, researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park recruited 61 participants who had each kept an “enormous secret” in the last seven years. While 70% of these secrets were romantic or sexual in nature – such as hiding their sexuality or cheating – other secrets included suicide attempts, jail time, or something that would alienate the subject from their friends and family.

The researchers found that after participants started hiding a secret, they actually increased email contact with those they were keeping in the dark. The researchers put this down to “hypervigilance”, i.e. becoming extra careful about maintaining these relationships.

The secret keepers also started using significantly more present tense verbs towards those they were keeping secrets from. “A focus on the present and the other person may be a strategy to avoid talking about the secret and to maintain control of conversation topics,” write the authors.

“By analyzing language used in actual email communications before and during secret keeping, we were able to characterize changes in the relationship between secret keepers and secret targets,” they say. “The results suggest that the secret keeper may be using active strategies to keep the secret hidden including ‘acting normal’ and increasing communication to secret targets.”

Although if more emails and present tense verbs definitively mean that someone’s keeping a big secret, then whoever’s behind those “Lose Belly Fat Now” emails must be hiding a whopper.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Do these findings apply to other forms of communication, like texts or even face to face exchanges?

Disrupt Your Feed

I wonder what excessive use of smiley faces means…

Drop This Fact

People who check emails after work have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, compared to those who only check their emails during work hours.